The invention disclosed herein relates generally to document processing systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to systems and methods for dynamically processing citation data for presentation within a document rendering application, such as a word processor.
Document processing systems and methods are well known to the art, most notably dynamic spell checking systems. One example of a document processing system for dynamic spell checking is U.S. Pat. No. 5,649,222 (“the '222 patent”) by to Mogilevsky. The disclosure of the '222 patent discusses a method for checking spelling in a word processor wherein spell checking is conduced in conjunction with the editing process. The spell checker maintains a table of spelling status data, which includes codes to identify checked, unchecked or edited ranges of characters. During idle periods, the spelling status data is analyzed to determine text requiring spell checking and spelling errors are highlighted during the editing process. The spelling status data is maintained with the document so that spell checked portions of the document do not need to be re-checked.
Similar systems and methods are also known to the art wherein the grammar of an electronic document is verified in a background process. For example, according to U.S. Pat. No. 6,012,075 (“the '075 patent”) to Fein, at al., while a word processor is in edit mode, i.e., the user is entering data or commands, idle periods are identified by the word processing software or a component thereof. During a given idle period, a sentence is extracted from the document to determine whether the sentence is properly constructed. If the sentence is not properly constructed, an error is indicated to the user in the context of the electronic document. This process is repeated for each sentence in the electronic document until either the entire electronic document is proofed or the idle period ends. A context menu may be displayed to present corrections for the error.
Systems and methods such as those known to the art, however, do not teach how to apply the state of the art to systems and methods for automatically processing literary citations. The process of properly citing references in a document, such as an article for a scholarly journal, is necessarily complex due to the sheer number of potential references for citation. Furthermore, systems and methods directed to problem of automatically processing citations must ensure the accuracy of processed citations, as well as select a citation from one or more acceptable citations based on a limited set of citation data. Thus, systems and methods are required for automatically processing citations within documents based on citation data provided by an author.